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40 Percent Human, 60 Percent Chicken

More than occasionally I wonder why I attempt to do so. With this practice comes shame and more than a lack of compassion. A sense of self loathing for my inabilities to function well.

I'm not doing enough, Failing to face my fears. Failing to make the most of my life. Failing to connect with an incredibly strange world and the people that inhabit my corner of it. Failing to hold my own experience and feel safe. Failing to serve my loved ones with positivity. Failing to remember to do my chores. Failing to fully understand or even see why I am deserving of not just love, but good fortune and reward.

What a horribly useless and broken man I am.

How am I to transcend such a brain washed belief system? CBT, EFT, ECT, BBC, EFTPOS?

And what do you think of me for expressing such self deprecation, for being 'depressed,' for not getting 'over and on with it?' I wonder often and ask occasionally but still don't have a useful answer.

I can feel societies judgment and I struggle to separate my own from 'yours.'

There are days where I'm filled with joy, the anticipation of great opportunities. The desire to build a mini dub sound system, to play in an old mans gypsy punk (punk = technically inept) garage band, to travel this incredible country and the world with my partner. To celebrate my union with her in our lovely back yard, surrounded by humans that I struggle to connect to and chickens that I don't. It is difficult to calculate the ratio between positive and negative experiences of myself. It's got to be somewhere between 1:500 and 1:1000.

And here I am sat in a laneway off of a high street surrounded by groups of elderly first generation immigrant men. Their raised voices and gesticulations suggest to me that they are in community with each other. What is it that prevents me from belonging to a community outside of work?

There is a shared element between these old men. They are speaking in the same foreign tongue. They are countrymen, comrades and friends from the same generation. They have, if not walked exactly in each other's shoes, owned similar types of slippers.

If the pre requisite for membership of a tribe is predominantly a shared life experience then which tribe would I join? The fucked up 40 something survivors of abuse is the most obvious. That's all very well but I need a break from this shit. I want to feel connected to the non abused fucked up forty somethings. For whatever reason I don't, so for now I guess my tribe is the people who feel more comfortable around chickens than they do around people. Anyone else out there with me?